Sir
Thomas Browne,London, 1642: "There is a musick
wherever there is a harmony, order or proportion,"
thus "even that vulgar and Tavern-Musick which makes
one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of
devotion, and a profound contemplation of the First
Composer. There is something in it of Divinity more than
the ear discovers; it is an Hieroglyphical and shadowed
lesson of the whole World, and creatures of God; such a
melody to the ear, as the whold World, well understood.

Notes on NOISE, by Jaques
Attali, University of Minnesota Press.

by Jocelyn Braddell

Here is a book that should be
designated: TO READ, ESSENTIAL...for all musicians, for
composers, and the ordinary public. Indirectly the
ordinary public are the subjects of this book. The copy I
have to hand, issued by the Minnesota Press is from their
Series "Theory and History of Literature", the
5th Edition printed in 1996. I suggest it can be held up
now for re-evaluation and introduced to a new generation.

The author of this book could be
described as a Nietzschean warrior. In the Foreword by
Fredric Jameson the fortress of the reader's mind
immediately comes under siege."Jaques Attali is a
professional economist," and, he observes," the
current phenomenon of child prodigies in music and
mathematics alike perhaps also suggests the peculiarity
of the numerical gift." I should, perhaps, emphasise
with italics the word "peculiarity"...

Attali's bold perogative for writing
this book is his theory that all music composition is
prophetic. "By listening to noise we can better
understand were the folly of men and their calculations
is leading us and what hopes it is still possible to have."
There again "hopes" is another candidate for
italics....His theories are related to philosophy and
move forward from the spring-board of signs. "In the
face of the growing ambiguity of the signs being used and
exchanged, well-established concepts are crumbling and
theory wavering." He assures us that the results of
his reflections will lead us to unusual and unacceptable
concepts. Can we assume from this that the barriers to
understanding maybe similar to the reactions he expects
to encounter in his professional life in politics ?!

His first chapter assaults the nerves
with a red hot pace. With the use of italics he urges the
emphasis of his demands and the structures of his debate.
He offers a collection of theoretical passes that thrust
us over the threshold into his mind. Let this be an
example: "..among birds a tool for marking
territorial boundaries, noise is inscribed from the start
with the panoply of power."

What we have here is a clear
association he wishes to make in the history of music:
composers and musicians have constrained opportunities
within the panoply of events with which music has most
notably been represented. From the ancient religious
rites of the pagan to the nomad life of the troubadour,
or the jongleur, as he prefers to call him... from the
opera and pantomime of the sovereign courts to the
performance in huge stadia of the modern rock star.
Attali is fascinated to cast over this elaborate history
the shroud of the subversive revolutionary - a paradox.
His question is - if music in truth is prophetic, does
its performance also signal the reality of the present
era of civilisation ? And does the magic of public
appraisal, financial, hide the status of subversive
possibility ?

His style comprises a method applied to
policy documents, i.e. a change of perspective is
signalled by a title in bold text. On page 18 we have the
title Understanding through Music; the
following paragraph begins: "If we wish to elaborate
a theory of the relations between music and money..."
Would you be surprised? However, let you not sink back or
utter a sigh... Signor Attali will not leave off his pace
or the grasp he has on your attention.

This book is a slender volume and his
natural ability as a mathematician, I suspect,
predetermines the brevity with which he demonstrates
categories and startling theories. He makes reference to
Roland Barthes - that master of other slender
publications, who once lamented the practices of music
critics in extensive volumes, for the multiple uses of
that "poorest of linguistic categories: the
adjective."

The cover and frontis-piece of this
book is an illustration of the painting CARNIVAL'S
QUARREL WITH LENT by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. The
subject of this picture is the axis of Attali's concepts
as he continues to dwell on the aspects of power which
have overwhelmed the purpose and practice of music and
has succeeded in trammelling in repetitive reproduction
and finance, an art, one of the true wonders of mankind's
creative potential, within the industrial concept of
"the product." Brueghel's painting depicts a
world where the community was yet a rowdy, laughing,
musical, roaring and whispering world of differences.
These marginalised lives of workers and the crippled
nevertheless carried the seeds of freedom into a world
the Church was seeking to dominate, a Church that had
become the prop and support of political power. The
artistry of Attali's writing carries the force of his
outrage: " thus a colossal conflict pivots around a
well, a point of catastrophy - a conflict between two
social orders..." With italics he refers to music as
a weapon - a weapon that is a simulacrum of
ritual murder. These aspects of his style convey a
strong intellectual stimulus to the reader. In the sketch
of my first reactions in thought, considering the
claustrophobic effects of the rap beat, the pathological
and oppressive nature of modern music in every turn of
life, in the street, in factories, in the snack bar and
at the disco where young people use drugs to excite a
community feeling - it becomes obvious that his
pessimistic view of the direction civilisation is heading
is without scene or sense. For the individual, whose
freedom is supposed to be the triumph of our present
democracies, infact the result is solitude. A solitude
that represses all forms of free communication.

Attali's glance is never careless: the
history of contracts, the rites of publication and
coprights, the dedication on a manuscript, libraries,
sovereign decrees, National Institutes - with a
penetrating glance he accesses the import for his
equation. Renumeration is the name of this game played
out over the centuries by speculators who have laid out
sinister traps for the unwary and have seemingly complete
dominance today. At the end of this history we find
ourselves among those fine musicians of the American jazz
scene, who in their turn are being "produced"by
white Americans to deploy their music, that is only
created in itself by their own relationships within their
local communities, into expensive venues of white
Americans. The concept of locally created music is the
only thread that has emerged from the distant past, from
whence all music came.It represents that ancient model of
all musical vibrations, play and sport, music for
pleasure and the impulse to innovate.

We are now living in a world with
reproduction of music as product. Such composers
as Philip Glass try to subvert the issue by
writing music that "allows the musicians to
take an active role.... ...Despite these
appearances the musician has never been so
deprived of initiative, so annonymous." For
indeed we can now no longer find much opportunity
to compare actual performances of the classics.Competitions
are set Internationally to produce the performers
for the product; and the pain this must cause the
talented can be imagined. Concert Halls show off
Prize Winners who must play schedules on which
they have hardly been consulted.

Where are the hopes to
be traced that we need to free us from this trap ? The
"hope that it is still possible to have"? Are
we forced to accept that music today is "in many
respects the monotonous herald of death." Noise or
Silence - the polarisation and the terminus of one of
mankind's most happy variables. Music as a shriek in
Silence or the guttural snooze of Noise?

Only quite recently has it been
announced that in the not too distant future there will
be industrial man-made wombs available to raise the
foetus of our child up to birth - will we even maintain
the memory of music that "directly transected by
desires and drives, has always had but one subject - the
body." ?"A great musical work is always a model
of amorous relations, a model of relations with the
other, of eternally recommenceable exaltation and
appeasment, an exceptional figure of represented or
repeated sexual relations."

To end these notes I will continue to
quote Attali because it is his real demand for the
subversive that excites us ultimately. This "subversion
outlined here: to stockpile wealth no longer, to
transcend it, to play for the other and by the other, to
exchange the noise of bodies, to hear the noise of others
in exchange for one's own. For my own part I would like
to hear the Round Dance in the background of CARNIVAL'S
QUARREL WITH LENT.... to signify that everything remains
possible."